


Just a Game

by t0talcha0s



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Hospitalization, Minor Violence, Not Canon Compliant, Other, Post-Game, Psychosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 06:04:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6183538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/pseuds/t0talcha0s
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The game had ended, the universe had been reset, but Roxy didn't understand this world so she clung to all her memories she believed to be true. But after all of it, she couldn't tell what her truth was anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just a Game

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Game Won](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4245921) by [t0talcha0s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/pseuds/t0talcha0s). 



> We are the reckless,  
> We are the wild youth  
> Chasing visions of our futures  
> One day we'll reveal the truth  
> That one will die before he gets there.
> 
> And if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones.  
> 'Cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone.  
> We're setting fire to our insides for fun.  
> Collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home,  
> It was a flood that wrecked this home.
> 
> -Youth by Daughter (required listening)

It had been a war in the end, or at least that was what it was easiest to call it. Roxy didn't see him often, occasionally in her dreams, in the snarky comments of someone on the street, in her strange mannerisms as she struggled to fit into society. She would turn back to alcohol if the social excursions and strange view of streets not full of fish and water didn't keep her from leaving her house. Life was exhausting, she didn't know what to do anymore. 

Roxy had a mother now. The sound of her clicking heels through the house startled her at night, so unused to another human living and breathing near her. She had explored the cosmos, she had fought monsters, and summoned the end to it all, she had saved the universe and thousands of more. But Roxy couldn't face her mother without imagining her body broken and bleeding and slipping through her fingers as the sick bittersweet illusion of this world shattered around her. Roxy couldn't believe the world around her was real because she had fought so long and so hard and lived without any of this, all of this so it can't be real. And denial was the easiest pill to swallow. 

Dirk showed up on her doorstep one day, black shades absorbing all the light around them. 

_Dirk oh Dirk I missed you!_ She cried. _You can help me understand this all, we can do this together, we saved this world we can live through it!_ And Dirk ran her through with his katana. 

She woke up the morning after in the hospital. The nurses explained she had been hallucinating, Roxy was appalled by their ability to touch her, their fingertips burned into her skin like their brand may never leave. 

"Psychotic." the nurses whispered when they thought Roxy wasn't listening. "Unable to comprehend reality. Repressed memories. Therapy. Medicine." Each word knocked the breath out of Roxy and made her struggle and want to tear out the terribly intrusive needles that pumped who-knows-what directly into her veins. Roxy had told her mother she didn't like hospitals, she wasn't used to this medicine, only ate seafood, needed her computers and labs. Roxy didn't live in this world, didn't want to live in this world, this was not the world she knew and perhaps she was unable to comprehend it but she was also painfully aware it was all a cruel mirage created by the game to lull her into compliancy. But she had a war to fight and a tyrant to kill and a universe to save and that was the only way she knew how to function anymore. She didn't have them, cherry red, orange, blue, and green, she couldn't cope with this false reality. 

The nurses lashed her arms and legs to the hospital bed and Roxy found that they chafed less when she didn't struggle against them. 

Dirk appeared above her bed, his expression blank and his hand resting atop her hair, it held no compassion. 

_Dirk oh Dirk help me, they'll keep me locked up in here. They don't understand, none of them, it's true, it's all true, the batterwitch, derse, skaia, I need to know its true._ And Dirk slit her throat in a cruel imitation of his own. 

The nurses sent her to therapy, a soft gray couch and an enemy across from her. Her fingers itched for her rifle. 

"Paranoia. Psychosis. Trauma." The enemy's words ricocheted off her. "Are you hearing me Roxy?" Her head nodded deliberately, she did not. "Your mother cares very much about you, she doesn't remember anything so horrible as you've described." Roxy consumed the enemy's guilting and spat it back at them in her silence. Roxy felt no kinship towards the woman who called herself mother, she could remember wanting her but not knowing her. 

_I'm not lying. I'm not lying. I'm not lying. I'm not lying._ Roxy couldn't say anything else, she had to believe it. If none of it was true, if there was no game, no flooded world, no Dirk or Jane or Jake, no skaia, no derse, if there was none of it then who was she? If she was not the rouge of void what was she? If this was all a lie then what was her truth? 

The pills the enemy gave her shone like the sun and burnt like hellfire no matter how much water she took with them. They made her memory flaky, bits of her narrative dropped away to be replaced with pleasant meals with her mother and frantic internet searches for 'sburb', 'skaia', and 'derse'. 

Dirk came to her less and less, his sword cut through the tension in her body with less frequency. Roxy couldn't tell if she missed his visits or was thankful that this phantom plagued her no more. he came to her as she sat at the dinner table, fish on her plate, she wouldn't eat anything but seafood. 

_Dirk oh Dirk I'm losing you, I'm losing my mind, I don't know if any of that, if you, were real, I don't know if this is real, do we have a universe to save? Do I have an egg to create? I need you._ And Dirk skewered her heart upon his blade and he flickered away to reveal her mother's creased frown. 

"Roxy, darling, come back to me." 

_I can't breathe mother, I can't breathe._ Roxy smiled. "This fish is delicious."

"What's got your mind preoccupied love?" 

"Just a game today mom, just a game."

**Author's Note:**

> This fcking 10-minute, weird style, minor vent fic is all I've been able to whip up in current state of writers block. It's weirdly polished for the frenzied pace it was written in. 
> 
> My tumblr's barefootcosplayer.


End file.
